There was no sky here. No stars, no time. Just silence, stretched taut across a dead multiverse.
It wasn't always like this. Once, this place had danced with life, shimmered with possibility. Worlds spun in perfect rhythm. Civilizations rose and fell, worshipped and warred beneath endless constellations. But now, only dust and entropy remained—scattered remnants of what was, bearing witness to what should never have been.
In the heart of this broken reality stood two beings. Titans in every sense. Not by size, but by presence—by the sheer gravity of their existence. Every breath they took twisted physics. Every motion echoed through timelines long extinct.
They had been fighting for so long that history itself had stopped keeping track. Centuries? Eons? A thousand collapses? Time could no longer be trusted here.
What mattered now was this final confrontation. This one moment, suspended in eternity.
One of them stood bloodied, broken, and unbowed.
A man—no, a force—wreathed in the last light that had not yet fled the void. His hair glistened silver-white, clinging to his face with sweat and blood. His once-vibrant blue eyes, eyes that had once gazed upon creation with serenity, were now rimmed red with strain. His armor, forged from the crystallized will of a dying star, was crumbling. His right arm, wrapped in radiant force barely containing the bleeding, held tight to a sword that still hummed with sacred memory.
He staggered but did not fall. Not yet.
Across from him hovered a figure of living contradiction.
It bore no true face—only a mask of obsidian, endless and shifting. Its body was clad in armor shaped by something far older than sanity. The patterns etched across its surface bent in impossible angles, glitched in and out of reality like a dream unfinished. A thousand otherworldly limbs flared and vanished across its shoulders, each one pulsing with the memory of destruction.
And yet, despite the devastation raging through the empty cosmos, its armor gleamed. Untouched. Unsullied.
It always remade itself. Always returned. Always adapted.
The silence between them was louder than any scream.
Then, breath.
The man with silver hair exhaled, long and slow—drawing every remaining ounce of strength from his weakening frame. He stepped forward, dragging his blade behind him, leaving arcs of light that flickered into nothing.
His voice, ragged and hollow, cut through the stillness.
"Brother... this doesn't have to end like this. We can stop. Right now. We can go back."
The response came in a laugh—not one born of joy, but madness. Amused. Disgusted. Echoing with a thousand lifetimes of spite.
"Go back? To what? The lie you built from ash and silence? You still think there's a choice. That there's a balance left to restore. But you're too late. You've always been too late."
The being's voice fractured on every syllable, as if a chorus of distorted echoes argued behind its words.
"You call me brother, but you forget it was your light that cast the first shadow. Don't mourn the war, when you were the first to draw your blade."
The man flinched. Not at the accusation—it had been hurled before, too many times to count. But at the truth buried beneath it. There was no innocence here. Not anymore.
Blood dripped from his cracked lips as he lowered his gaze, if only for a moment.
"You know that's not true. We built this together. You and I. The first spark. The first song. You loved it. You protected it."
"I evolved," the entity snarled, its armor writhing with a life of its own. "And you stagnated."
They stood again in silence.
In another life, maybe they were gods. Brothers, born at the boundary between order and entropy. But now, they were something worse: the last two relics of an ideology that could no longer coexist.
The man tightened his grip on the sword. He didn't want to fight. He never wanted to fight.
He had spent millennia searching for another way. Dialogues in dreams. Echoes through time. Secret meetings across fragmented dimensions, each ending in ruin.
But now? Now the toll was too great. Universes had perished. Life as they knew it had splintered.
The one across from him—the one he had once known as kin—no longer sought coexistence. It wanted erasure. Unmaking. Because that was all it had left.
So he made a decision.
He released the sword.
The clang of its fall resounded through what remained of existence like a judgment.
The armored entity froze. Cautious. Curious. Was this surrender?
"Finally come to your senses?" it asked. There was glee now. Almost pity.
The man didn't respond with words. Only a small, sad smile.
His hands began to move—slow, deliberate gestures etched into his soul across ages. Glyphs spun from light curled from his fingertips, drawing arcane geometries into the dead space between them.
The entity's amusement curdled into dread.
"What are you doing?"
The man's voice was almost tender.
"What I should have done long ago."
The void trembled.
This was no attack. No weapon. This was soulcraft. Old magic. A final, forbidden invocation that could never be undone.
"You fool," the entity roared. "This won't kill me. You know that!"
"It's not meant to," he whispered.
"Then why—"
And then it understood.
The seal.
It wouldn't destroy the entity. It couldn't.
But it would trap it. Bind it. Remove it from all timelines, all futures. Lock it in a wound between possibilities where even its corruption could not spread.
And the price… was the caster's life.
The entity lunged forward, a dozen jagged arms spiraling outward like a scream made flesh—but too late.
The spell activated.
A pulse of radiant force erupted outward, brighter than any sun, washing over all things.
The armored being howled—not in pain, but in frustration.
"Do you realize what you've done?! I wasn't going to end it! Not yet! Not this way!"
Light devoured the figure before it could say more.
And when the radiance faded...
It was gone.
The man remained.
Barely.
His body flickered at the edges, dissolving into luminescent dust, as if the universe mourned his departure by unraveling him slowly. One piece at a time.
He floated there, above the sword he had let go, above the graveyard of stars, and closed his eyes.
No triumph in his expression.
Only sorrow. Regret. And a strange, haunting peace.
"I'm sorry, my brother," he whispered to the silence. "Maybe... one day... you'll remember who you were."
The silence did not respond.
He looked outward, across what little remained. The remnants of all they'd built. Of all they'd lost.
"I don't know who will come next," he murmured. "But someone will. And when they do... I hope they burn brighter than I ever could."
And then, softly—so softly—he spoke his final words:
"Protect the multiverse... no matter the cost. And protect the one who lights your spark… no matter what."
With that, the last fragment of his body dissolved into light, carried on nonexistent wind, scattering across creation like stardust lost to memory.
And in the absolute quiet that followed, far from any eyes, a tiny ember flickered where he had stood—a spark waiting.
Waiting to be found.